Linux 5.0 Finally Released By Linus Torvalds — But It Doesn’t Mean Anything
The Linux creator Linus Torvalds has finally released Linux 5.0 after a long wait. Earlier this year in January, he confirmed the same with the shipping of the first release candidate of Linux 5.0.
However, in case you were expecting tons of major features with this numerical jump from 4.x to 5.x, you’ll end up being disappointed. In his release announcement, Linus wrote that it’s well established that the Linux development team doesn’t do feature-based releases.
“”5.0” doesn’t mean anything more than that the 4.x numbers
started getting big enough that I ran out of fingers and toes,” he further added.
Anyway, the complete changelog for 5.0 is still substantial. There are changes and additions like support for energy aware-scheduling, Adiantum file system encryption for low-power devices, AMDGPU FreeSync, Btrfs swap file, etc.
Moreover, there are some changes for better mitigation of Spectre and Meltdown bugs as well.
It goes without saying that the 5.0 release has also opened the merge window for Linux 5.1. “I’m happy to see that I already have several early pull requests. Which I’ll start processing tomorrow,” Linus added in the announcement post.
You can go ahead and download the freshly baked Linux kernel 5.0 from kernel.org. For detailed reading on Linux 5.0 features, you can visit this article from KernelNewbies.
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